Athletics: Memories stirred of Olympic hostage horror

By Brendan Gallagher

12:01AM BST 06 Aug 2002

The last time major championship athletics medals were decided in the magnificent, 70,000-capacity Munich Olympic Stadium was 30 years ago at an Olympics which West Germany billed as the 'Games of Peace and Joy'. If only.

The enduring trackside images include Valery Borzov winning the 100 and 200 metres, Mary Peters battling her way down the home straight of the 200m to take pentathlon gold, David Hemery finishing third in the 400m hurdles as Uganda's John Akii-Bua upset the form book by running away with the event in a world record, and Lasse Viren completing an extraordinary 5,000m-10,000m double.

But the memory that lingers most vividly is the death of 11 Israeli competitors following an assault on their apartment in the athletes' village by Black September, a radical faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

The Black September unit had entered the supposedly high-security compound of the village by scrambling under a perimeter fence around 4am on Sept 5. Incredibly, they aroused no suspicion - athletes from many countries had been doing likewise as they returned from clandestine trips into town. The terrorists wore tracksuits and carried sports bags and once in the compound, they even mingled with a group of American competitors who had been sampling, rather to excess, the fine wines and beers of southern Bavaria.

The intruders, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades, stormed the Israeli apartment to round up hostages, killing wrestler Moshe Weinberg, who put up furious resistance, and a team-mate.

A hooded terrorist stalked the balcony of the Israeli apartment, a brutal executioner who would himself be dead by the time the world's newspapers printed his haunting picture the following day. The nine hostages, five of the eight terrorists and a German policeman died early on Sept 6 after a firefight at the military airbase of Furstenfieldbruck, where the athletes and terrorists had been taken by helicopter the previous evening after a day of negotiations.

Although a press conference was called just after 1am, details of the fatalities at the airport were delayed until 3.30am to ensure that the news would miss the last editions of papers across Europe. Before the days of 24-hour television news, this gave the Games organisers and German police another day to prepare a detailed 'explanation' of what had happened.

The Munich massacre stopped the world in its tracks. A memorial service was held in the stadium on Sept 7 and broadcast to an estimated television audience of 900 million.

Beethoven played sombrely in the background, the flags of more than 100 competing nations flew at half mast. Jesse Owens - the Germans' guest of honour for a Games designed to expunge the memory of the 1936 Berlin Olympics - wept quietly in the stands. It was all too much for Carmel Eliash, a cousin of Weinberg, who collapsed with a heart attack and died as she mourned in the stadium.

Eleven empty seats for the Israeli dead spoke volumes but even on that crisp September day, the sporting world was not entirely united. Some Arab countries refused to attend the service, while one Lebanese delegate affected to know nothing of the events. "What service? What shootings?" he said.

The decision to continue with the Games was not universally popular. Willi Daume, head of the West German National Olympic Committee and de facto head of German athletics, was initially appalled at the prospect and had to be talked around by Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee.

The Philippines team headed home, six members of the Dutch squad packed their bags, including sprinter Wilma van Gool who left complaining of the "obscene decision to continue", while 13 members of the Norwegian squad stayed but declined to compete in their events.

The Games did eventually crank into action the following day with a handball match between Romania and Hungary, the start delayed by 10 minutes after a bomb scare.

Somehow the show staggered on and the Games finally ended when the Trinidad and Tobago squad trailed home eighth in the 4 x 400m relay. Since then championship athletics and the Olympic stadium, by unspoken accord, have been estranged. When the European Championships finally pick up the baton this morning, in a competition which includes a team from Israel, don't be surprised if the memories, and the nightmare, come flooding back.